January 16, 2007

Rock Art Today
Rock art is a major part of our cultural heritage. It is certainly the
most ancient and perhaps the most vulnerable. How can we best preserve
the millions of images on rocks throughout the world, which constitute
a kind of gigantic museum collection exposed to the depredations of
nature and human activity?

Preserving a Worldwide Heritage: A Discussion about Rock Art Conservation
J. Claire Dean, an archaeological conservator in private practice;
Josephine Flood, former director of the Aboriginal Environment section
of the Australian Heritage Commission; and Jo Anne Van Tilburg,
director of the Rock Art Archive at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of
Archaeology, talk with Neville Agnew and Jeffrey Levin of the Getty
Conservation Institute.

U.S. Rock Art in the Twenty-first Century: Problems and Prospects
The last two decades have witnessed a dramatic change in the status of
North American rock art, expressed in the United States by numerous
research advances and a greater concern for conservation and site
management. While these improvements are cause for optimism, serious
problems persist, including the lack of trained rock art conservators
and limited resources for site documentation and management.

Building Capacity to Conserve Southern African Rock Art
Over the years, the GCI has facilitated conservation and training
programs to improve the management of rock art sites, particularly in
the Americas and Australia. The lessons learned from these programs
have been valuable in structuring the Institute's most recent
involvement in rock art conservation—the Southern African Rock Art
Project.

Huts have been reconstructed near the site as a heritage center. (photo credit: Institute of Archaeology, University College London)

Humble Brass Was Even Better Than Gold to a 16th-Century Tribe in Cuba

By JENNIFER PINKOWSKI

Because of its otherworldly brilliance, the 16th-century Taíno Indians of Cuba called it turey, their word for the most luminous part of the sky.

They adored its sweet smell, its reddish hue, its exotic origins and its dazzling iridescence, qualities that elevated it to the category of sacred materials known as guanín. Local chieftains wore it in pendants and medallions to show their wealth, influence and connection to the supernatural realm. Elite women and children were buried with it.

What was this treasured stuff? Humble brass — specifically, the lace tags and fasteners from Spanish explorers’ shoes and clothes, for which the Taíno eagerly traded their local gold.

A team of archaeologists from University College London and the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment came to these conclusions by analyzing small brass tubes found in two dozen burial sites in the Taíno village of El Chorro de Maíta in northeastern Cuba, according to a recent paper in The Journal of Archaeological Science. [Local note: not electronically available at MMA]

The graves mostly date to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, when waves of gold-hungry conquistadors landed on Caribbean shores. Within decades, the Taíno, like their neighbors the Carib and the Arawak, were largely wiped out by genocide, slavery and disease.

But the archaeologists say this is not the whole picture. Their research — the first systematic study of metals from a Cuban archaeological site — focuses on one of the few indigenous settlements ever found that date from the period after the arrival of Europeans. The scientists say the finds add important detail and nuance to a history of the Caribbean long dominated by the first-person reportage of the Europeans themselves.

“It’s certainly true that the arrival of the Europeans was in the short term devastating,” said Marcos Martinón-Torres of University College London, the project’s lead researcher. “But instead of lumping the Taíno in all together as ‘the Indians of Cuba who were eliminated by the Spaniards,’ we’re trying to show they were people who made choices. They had their own lives. They decided to incorporate European goods into their value system.”

January 11, 2007

Jason Baird Jackson (JBJ) of Museum Anthropology (the blog) takes a moment to point out an enhancement in Museum Anthropology (the journal), relating it to the searching capabilities of a critical research tool in our field:

Readers of Museum Anthropology
(MUA) 29(2) will note that, with this issue, we began publishing
abstracts of articles. Not only does this bring us into line with
standard practice for scholarly journals, it was a move aimed at
facilitating access to MUA article content via AnthroSource. Internet
visitors to AnthroSource who lack individual or library access can gain
table of content information and, if they choose, pay-per-view access
to individual items. Providing an abstract gives such potential
customers at least some knowledge of what they might be buying into.

In-house (i.e. MMA) researchers should have library access (or more accurately, desktop access) shortly. In fact I am remiss in not having it available even now. My apologies, and hang in there! In the meantime we do have print versions of many of the AnthroSource titles. So ask in the library first before you pony up.

AK: What is the premise of the Africa Comics exhibition, and how was the work selected?

TG: The premise of Africa Comics is to provide a primer on contemporary artists working in comic and graphic form on the African continent. This exhibition came about for me, curatorially, in a somewhat funny, serendipitous way. In 2000, Africa e Mediterraneo, an organization dedicated to bettering European understanding of African culture, decided that comic art was a project that could reach out both to African communities in Europe and communities on the continent. They began to offer prizes for the best unpublished African comic art and have published, in the last six years, individual and anthology volumes. They never had the opportunity to show the work in America and came to me for advice; I immediately saw the opportunity for an exhibition. The challenge of bringing the works to an American audience was that while they were picked for both aesthetic and narrative content, many of them are not in English. Given the complex colonial histories of Africa, "native" languages may combine French, Portuguese, and Afrikaans with Wolof and Swahili.

Africa e Mediterraneo and the museum worked together to curate a selection of work and then took on the task of translating them into a handout for visitors to take with them, so that they could not only appreciate the incredible graphic diversity, but also the content, which really gives a more personal window into the daily lives of contemporary Africans. [read the rest of the interview here]

NEW HAVEN, Jan. 3 — Fans of air, light and it-just-feels-right in architecture will find
everything to admire in the revamped and revivified version of the Yale University Art Gallery’s
Louis Kahn building. Post-Kahnian partitions have been pulled down,
picture windows uncovered. Rangy Modernist space — the space of the
future when the building opened in 1953 — unfurls in all directions.

And for the first time I can remember, the famous coffered ceilings really come across as the leitmotif they were meant to be. Repeated from floor to floor, gallery to gallery, their deep tetrahedral pattern starts out feeling overbearing, then gradually becomes dynamic and a little hypnotic. It sinks into your brain. I saw it in a dream the night after my visit.

[...]

And now we come to the innovation, and the compelling reason (Kahn apart) for making a visit: a big new permanent gallery devoted to the arts of Africa, with an inaugural display of a size and quality to put Yale at the head of the class, among university art museums, in this field.

Most of the art arrived only recently. It’s from a collection of nearly 600 African objects given to the museum by Charles B. Benenson (1913-2004), a New York real estate developer and Yale alumnus. And in addition to leaving Yale one of the largest gifts of art in its history, Mr. Benenson endowed a curatorial position in African art at the museum. Frederick John Lamp, formerly of the Baltimore Museum of Art, has the job, and he designed the inaugural installation.

Africa is immense and immensely, complexly diverse. Try to define its art strictly by region or culture and you’re in trouble. Existing national boundaries are largely colonial inventions. A; he produced a terrific multidisciplinary book, “See the Music, Hear the Dance” (Prestel), in Baltimore. Rather than narrow categories, he expands them.

As if in direct contrast to the compartmentalized European installation, he has left the African space undivided and open. Although some objects have been bunched into thematic units, most fall under two loose conceptual categories, based on the idea of art as psychologically and spiritually “cool” or “hot,” a distinction explored by many art historians, among them Robert Farris Thompson, with whom Mr. Lamp studied at Yale.

Coolness, connoting serenity and benevolence, streams from the powdery-white female figure in a Yoruba shrine sculpture at the gallery entrance. And it is the essence of a grand Baga dance mask representing an ideal of maternal probity. Exceptional in size and beauty, it is one of the noblest images at Yale, and anywhere else, for that matter.

Arrayed on a diamond-shaped platform across from it is a kind of flying wedge of smaller “hot” figures, several from Cameroon and Nigeria. Grimacing, twisting, generally making a spectacle of themselves, they project volatile, forceful, even violent dispositions. In the right hands, their energy can be channeled in a positive, coactive direction, and Mr. Benenson seems to have been particularly partial to them, judging by the number here.

He was also that rare thing, a connoisseur of the uncanonical hybrid in art, as demonstrated by the presence of a headdress mask of a water spirit from Sierra Leone. With its brashly painted face and serpentine body made of imported leopard-skin-pattern fabric, the piece is a hot-cool medley, sweetly fanciful but also fierce in the fashion sense.

Pieces like this stand well outside “classical” African art as defined by Western taste, and I’m told there is more, and even wilder, stuff in the Benenson gift. If so, I can’t wait to see it. (Maybe some of it will show up in a show of new acquisitions scheduled for September.) In fact, my single reservation about the new gallery is that it is a mite tame, adhering too closely to well-mapped ground.

Over the last few decades, scholars, and specifically scholars of African art, have been redrawing that map. They’ve scrambled, revamped and revivified all sorts of old-time either/ors: art vs. artifact, Western vs. non-Western, functional vs. spiritual. They’ve shown that sound, movement and touch, the very elements we police our museums against, are essential to African art’s meaning. They are the art, because they complete it.

Much of the redrawing has been through experimental exhibitions, notably those at the Museum for African Art in New York, of which Mr. Benenson was a founding trustee. (The same institution’s founding director, Susan M. Vogel, was director of the Yale University Art Gallery in the 1990s.)

Of course, the present Yale installation is just a start. Mr. Lamp already has interesting plans in the works. They will lead him, no doubt, to tell the African art story differently in years to come. And his successors, perhaps one of his own students among them, may tell that history yet another way.

I love art for its pleasures, but I believe it is ultimately about teaching and self-education. University art museums are where self-education for many teachers-to-be begins. This is what makes them such important institutions. They are safe houses for success and failure alike. (I hope the new African gallery risks both in a big way.) And they are workshops where intellectual space and ethical light should be abundant, which is why the reopened Kahn building feels so right. [read the full article]

Read our earlier post about the reopening of the Yale University Art GalleryPictured above: The African art gallery at the Yale University Art
Gallery, including works donated by Charles B. Benenson and Congo carving (Thomas
McDonald for The New York Times)[source]

RANO RARAKU, Easter Island — As remnants of a vanished culture and a lure to tourists, the mysterious giant statues that stand as mute sentinels along the rocky coast here are the greatest treasure of this remote place.

Commercial and political interests on Easter Island want to unearth and restore more of the moai, but many residents of the island regard the possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

For local people, though, they also present a problem: what should be done about the hundreds of other stone icons scattered around the island, many of them damaged or still embedded in the ground?

Commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothing better than to restore more — or perhaps eventually all — of the moai, as the statues are known. But many residents of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name for Easter Island that is favored here, regard that possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

“We don’t want to become an archaeological theme park, a Disney World of moai,” Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the mayor of Hanga Roa, the island’s largest settlement, said in an interview. “If we are going to keep on restoring moai there has to be a good reason to do so.”

[...] As always, the ads and photographs in Harper's
are telling. There is a beautiful full-page ad, facing the "Harper's
Index," promoting heritage tourism in Romania. The key line is "25
UNESCO World Heritage Sites" suggesting they ways that the paradoxical
and problematic UNESCO list is being operationalized in tourism
promotion aimed at educated audiences. (On UNESCO heritage policy, see
MUA editorial board member Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's great essay in the new book Museum Frictions
(Durham, Duke University Press, 2006). Photographs on pages 24, 27, 65,
and 66 are especially evocative vis-a-vis material culture studies.
There is also an beautiful essay (I cannot tell if it is ethnographic
reportage or ethnographic fiction) on hopping freight trains ("Catching
Out" by William T. Vollmann) that brought to mind, for me, a wonderful
classic ethnography of Chicago School sociology, Nels Anderson'sThe Hobo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923).

January 03, 2007

Irving Feller in the back room of his fur shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with a painting of his wife, Selma.

EVEN IN A CITY full of talented people with eclectic interests, Irving Feller’s combination of work and obsession stands out. Mr. Feller is a furrier by trade and an abstract artist out of love.

He can make a sumptuous fur coat from scratch as easily as he can create jarring works of pattern and color. And both pursuits are informed by his passion for American Indian culture. All this has transformed his family’s fur business, started in 1916 by his father, into an unexpected preserve of one man’s vision.

Among the furs, paired with Mardi Gras beads draping the window’s mannequin to celebrate the new year, are a trove of artifacts: turquoise rings, a feathered headdress labeled “Child’s War Bonnet” and hand-sewn baby moccasins.